Christmas Wish Read Online Free PDF

Magda saw the dark side of the life of the girls across the road.
    One of the girls was shouting and screaming, hanging ontoa man for all she was worth. When he pushed her, she fell to the ground, her hands curling protectively across her belly.
    The older woman, the one Magda viewed as the Fairy Godmother in her story, came out of the house.
    She couldn’t hear the words clearly, just enough to know that the younger one was being encouraged to leave the man and go into the house.
    The girl, who looked quite plump to Magda’s eyes, shook her head, her hair flying wildly around her face.
    She lunged at the man, trying to hold onto him. He pushed her again, this time so violently that she fell backwards and fell full stretch on the ground.
    Then he kicked her.
    Magda covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes wide with horror.
    Other women came out of the house to help the injured girl inside. They disappeared. Only the older woman remained, her face like marble, staring in the direction the man had taken.
    The old woman caught sight of Magda watching from her puny window and shook her head again as though sharing a sad thought before retiring.
    A few days later Magda saw two men arrive in a hearse. A long black car like this had taken her mother away to the cemetery. Had the man pushed the girl hard enough to kill her?
    One of the black-clothed men in the hearse went into the house with something tucked beneath his arm.
    The man in black came back out, his head tilted forward, eyes fixed on the tiny white box he carried. That’s what he’d taken into the house, though covered then. Now it was obvious. The parcel beneath his arm had contained a tiny coffin.
    She saw the women dabbing their eyes as they followed the hearse. There were only three of them, the mother of the child, another girl supporting her and the Fairy Godmother.
    Seeing the small coffin Magda’s thoughts turned to her baby brother. Was he still alive?
    When her aunt rolled in from her favourite drinking haunt, her face redder than usual, her clothes dishevelled and her breath smelling of brown ale, Magda dared ask her about contacting her family.
    ‘I could write to them,’ she said hopefully, glancing up to where her mother’s Bible sat on the high shelf.
    Aunt Bridget slumped heavily into a chair. ‘Your father didn’t leave enough money for feeding you, my girl, let alone writing letters. Heat up that stew. You’ll get no pampering here. Not in this house.’
    Magda sighed. Food was mostly thin soups, stews and hunks of bread thickly spread with pork dripping or plum jam.
    Not that Aunt Bridget denied herself a decent meal; pigs’ tails, ox tongue, lamb chops and pork sausages. She devoured them all, the scraps left to the child whose big eyes were beginning to look even bigger in her heart-shaped face due to lack of sustenance.
    Aunt Bridget fell into a deep sleep, her head back, her mouth open and emitting a full-bodied snore.
    The steam from the soup misted the windows.
    Whilst her aunt lay snoring in the chair, Magda wrote the initials of her sisters’ names with her fingernail in the condensation. Then she wrote a large ‘M’ for Michael.
    ‘I miss you,’ she whispered. ‘I miss all of you.’
    Behind her, Aunt Bridget let out a resounding snore that almost woke her up.
    Magda froze. The moment of fear passed. The snoring continued unabated.
    The fire was as mean and smoky as ever and there was no point in piling on any more coal. The coal itself was contained in a pine box to one side of the grate. A cardboard box holdingnewspapers and bits of kindling sat the other side. The kettle, its spout black and its handle grease-covered, hummed like a pet cat on the hob.
    Magda shivered. No matter the time of year, the house was damp. It paid to keep moving about in order to stay warm. Even in bed Magda shivered beneath the thin, smelly blanket that Bridget had rejoiced in telling her had once covered a horse.
    She eyed the cardboard box,